I am happy to announce that my Pachube feed organizer/viewer application PachubeMon is now available as a free download on the App Store. It was also announced on the Pachube blog on Monday. Pachube is a web service available at pachube.com that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. PachubeMon is a utility app for the iPhone that lets you manage and view your Pachube feeds all in one place. The main page allows you to add and…

Across the web, individuals and business owners all over the globe are doing everything that they can to capture the attention of large groups of people. This is because the number of people that visit a site can make a significant difference in selling large volumes of products and services. Therefore, is not a luxury today but a necessity for those who want to run a profitable operation. Typically, the marketing campaigns that successful sites launch can be relatively costly if the business owner has the finances available for their…

The wait will be over soon, or soonish. A week after a leaked video showing features of Live 9 we have an official announcement of Live 9 from Ableton. New features include: Record automation into session view clips (finally!) Curved automation (finally!) Convert harmony, melody and drums to MIDI (!!!) New Browser More sounds Glue Compressor (made in conjunction with Cytomic, too bad I already own The Glue…) Improved EQ8 New displays on EQ8, Gate and Compressor New MIDI clip editing features Max4Live speed improvements New Max4Live devices, lots of…

Keeping with the theme of threes, I just put up three new tracks on Soundcloud that I recorded this summer. I figured as fall is arriving here already it was time to get them out. Brane Space and Something Familiar are both essentially modular patches that I then added to and arranged in Live. Both are pretty chill affairs. While not exactly a banger, Bug Light is a little harder and was made using the modular and other gear (hard and soft) in a more linear/traditional way. Truth be told…

Today I received a Synthesis Technology E350 morphing Terrarium, a MakeNoise Optomoix Low Pass gate and a Rebel Technology Στοιχεῖα (Stoicheia, or Elements) dual Euclidean Sequencer. I am in modular heaven. Here is a moody patch I just recorded making use of all three of these. The E350 is a wavetable synth that allows you to modulate independently by row and column through an 8 by 8 grid of waveforms and there are 3 different banks of waveforms to choose from. There is also a secondary output that can linearly…

I’m not sure of the origin of the meme but anyone that delves into the world of synthesis online will eventually come face to face with the slightly bizarre phenomena of photos of cats and synthesizers. I am most aware of this meme from the great modular synth community at Muff Wiggler where there is a brilliant, welcoming and very active forum about all things modular, as well as a good little wiki. There are also a lot of avatars that contain cats and synthesizers. When you first go to…

A foreboding banger for a late, hot night with lots of reverb curtesy of my new Strymon Blue Sky Reverberator pedal. Tiptop Audio drum modules. Roland HS-60 doing a big washy pad with plenty of Strymon Blue Sky Reverberator. Yamaha CS-10 doing the main lead. Other parts provided by Tiptop Audio Z3000s through a Doepfer A-124 Wasp filter and a Topobrillo Multifilter. Sequenced in Ableton and played by triggering the clips live and messing with effects sends and filter settings. Delay is Strymon El Capistan dTape Echo. All instruments run…

Sometimes with a modular system made up of modules from different manufacturers, or when integrating with other external analogue gear, it is necessary to invert a signal to get your modules speaking to each other in the desired way. Other times you may want to invert a signal for some creative patch you are building. This is especially true of triggers because there is no standard to use a rising edge trigger versus a falling edge trigger and sometimes we can be very particular about which kind of edge we…

Something that has unpleasantly surprised many an iOS developer is that to update the data in an sqlite database that is the backing store for CoreData you need to do more than just make a new release of your app with a new database file included in your bundle. The reason for this is that CoreData can’t write to your sqlite database while it is in the bundle, so the database is typically saved to the Documents folder. NOTE: With the advent of iCloud the Documents folder should only be…

I personally don’t use genre to browse my music collection. I find it too difficult to pin a label on a lot of music these days; I would just end up stringing adjectives. iTunes 8.0 defaults to showing genre in the list view and does not allow you to change this from within the app itself. Here is a quick fix for this: Open Terminal and type: defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE Then close and reopen iTunes and voila, genre is gone form the list view. To put genres…